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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#141
I can believe that 3 days a week in the office is more productive than 0, and maybe 4 slightly more than 3, but I wonder if 5 is any more productive than 4, or if Amazon is mostly trying to reduce headcount.

Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#142

Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.

The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk

Tech job market is wildly different from general job market.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#143

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data centers, etc.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#144

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#145

It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

>every single team is distributed. Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#146
post #10

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?

The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.

Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.

This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#147
post #135

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).

Apple has a very small office here too.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#148

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.

I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available.

If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#149
post #86

My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left. Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many…

I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.

When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#150

I see Mayor Bruce Harrell rubbing his hands together as he slowly nods in approval of all this. Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding, it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in the office with all the people I collaborate with across the states…

well, without people working downtown, it will be abandoned to drug addicts in a spiral of insufficient public safety resources and declining revenue. so i don’t blame him.
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